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36 the devil’s paintBrush Hieracium aurantiacum: “a bad weed in pastures and waste places” Before we met I used to write at night puffing like a fiend my row of pipes by a whisky glass in a dim pool of light: a smoky reeky bubble in the room where nothing could be seen below my waist or above the desklamp’s copper snakelike stem a self-contained and brain-eroding system Outside the bubble voices in the night pressed sibilant insistent but a waste of time and effort if they thought that by just calling they’d pull me from that room behind my eyes focused on this inner light or rather darkness . . . It wasn’t light I realize now Like a pilot as he stems the encroaching tide perched in a little room above the deck I wrote of weeds blood night death loneliness that money couldn’t buy: our long catechism of human waste . . . In short I was a bore We all can smell the waste we drown in—infants lost for lack of light lands for lack of courage disease that coughs nearby the bleeding that no bandages can stem— but those were my subjects as I scrawled all night inside the bubble in our living room 37 And now you open all the other rooms around me these Edens and the different ways our guiltless children breathe The gobs of night break up like ice in April light blessing all from snake to applestem until my devils fled and spit good-bye But how to write without them? There’s the rub I couldn’t work inside a bright-lit room and so began in dusky morning pipestem and whisky glass untouched An awful waste I thought learning slowly to love the light and slowly blinking rubbing off the night Now I can sleep at night though from this room by spotted daylight daisies still can see the devil’s paintbrush on its wasting stem ...

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